


Young Blood

by bodysnatch3r



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-28
Updated: 2013-11-28
Packaged: 2018-01-02 22:05:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodysnatch3r/pseuds/bodysnatch3r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thorin Oakenshield is set on reclaiming his lost homeland- the kingdom of Erebor has been in Smaug's grasp for much too long. Despite his better judgement (and his insistence) his younger siblings join on the quest: Frerin (smart, witty and good with a pen) and Dis (ferocious and terrible and born to be both a warrior and a queen). As brothers and things often go, they wreak havoc throughout it all- not that Thorin really minds, of course.<br/><span class="small">An AU in which Fili and Kili were never born, substituted by Frerin and Dis, based on Luci's <a href="http://artsygypsy.tumblr.com/post/46321400693/so-this-is-like-an-au-where-frerin-isnt-dead-and">great</a> <a href="http://artsygypsy.tumblr.com/post/46358877116/more-au-frerin-and-dis-in-case-you-cant-read-it">art</a>.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	Young Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [buckybarrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckybarrow/gifts).



## one

"Can you just-"

“ _I’m perfectly capable of_ -“

"No your cloak’s-"

“ _Fre-rin_.”

"I’m just  _trying to_ -“

But then the door opens and she hisses, ” _Quiet_ ,” and next thing they know in front of them’s standing a hobbit that looks everything  _but_  happy to see them. The youngest of the two nonetheless smiles at him, “Dis,” she says, all blue eyes and dark hair and  _scars_ , crisscrossing along her neck, biting into her cheek and scorching the lower part of her face, and her companion (who looks strikingly like her, minus the gray in his beard and whiskers) adds, “and Frerin!”. Then they both curtly bow, clasps in their hair jingling, and add: “ _at your service_ ,”  and the first thing the hobbit (whose name is Bilbo Baggins and who’s about to have his home invaded by nine other dwarves - without counting the two on his doorstep and the two already in his kitchen - and a wizard) feels like doing is slam the door in their faces.

There’s already enough dwarves in his home as it is, thank you very much.

He doesn’t, because just as he’s talking (“You can’t come in, you’ve come to the wrong house-“) and shutting them out, the girl pushes herself through and stops the door from closing. Dis stares at Bilbo, brow furrowed: “Has it been  _cancelled_?”

“ _Dee_ -” Frerin rolls his eyes.

"What?" Bilbo furrows his brow and squints at her, "what? No,  _nothing_ 's been cancelled-“

"Ah,  _wonderful_!”.

The girl then pushes her way through, smirking and arching an eyebrow at a very dumbfounded hobbit: dwarves invading his home wasn’t exactly what he had planned when he’d thought of a  _peaceful_  evening.

Her companion unceremoniously pushes his way past both of them. He limps, very slightly.

She stops right inside and pulls her twin swords off her back, handing them to Baggins alongside her cape. “Mind holding onto these for me, please?” is her question, as she proceeds to unsheathe four other blades and a pair of throwing axes and adding them to the pile in the hobbit’s arms, sterling silver grin never leaving her lips. Bilbo looks up in absolute confusion at the sheer amount of weapons one girl can carry just in time to see the other wipe his muddy boots on Baggins’ mother’s glory box. His cape is blue, hers is brownish-gray, and both of them are smirking so wide that for a second the hobbit fears their faces will split. 

But then one of the dwarves who’d been raiding his pantry- the youngest and tallest, covered in tattoos from the tip of his fingers to the very top of his balding head- calls them.

"Frerin,  _Dis_! Come in here, will ya? We need help with the table.”

And the dwarf-maiden’s smirk becomes something  _different_ (but it’s not that it matters), and Frerin, her older (but not oldest) brother follows her into the dining room, and Bilbo thinks he might scream in complete and utter despair.

* * *

## two

There’s a king amongst them, a king with no crown and blue eyes and dark hair splashed with gray, a king of a realm long gone and long lost.

Frerin sits perched on a windowsill in Bag-End, and his braids have been let down for the night, and the reds of the evening’s chatter and golds of song and of burning hopes have melted away: there’s blue now where his joy should be, a calm blue that matches that of skies before storms, of waters before whirlpools, of jumping off cliffs without knowing what’s waiting beneath.

A deep plunge, a deep breath.

"You should be sleeping."

The voice, so similar to his own but deeper, stirs him into awareness of his surroundings, and smoke swirls around his head as he clenches his pipe in his teeth.

"A Son of the Mountain should get his beauty rest."

"So should the  _king_ , then.”

His voice is rough on the edges and soft beneath his tongue, and hides nothing that isn’t love and exasperation brought on by exhaustion, and maybe just a little bit of childish playfulness. He smirks but Thorin doesn’t smirk back: his brother leans against the wall next to the window and doesn’t look Frerin in the eye. He’s eyeing Dis, curled up on an armchair next to the fireplace, bended over so that her head rests atop Dwalin’s, who’s dozed off on the floor, his head in her lap.

"You worry about her," Frerin whispers, whisps of smoke escaping lips still curled in a smile.

"Don’t you?"

"All the time. But she  _has_  proven she can tend to herself.”

Thorin scoffs at the memory of children quarreling and a tiny dwarfling girl ripping more than one chunk of hair out of her opponents’ heads and breaking quite a few teeth and bones, and the thought manages to wrench a smile from him: a small one, but it’s a curl of lips and a flash of teeth nonetheless.

"The serious king smiles, lo and behold."

“ _Shut up_.”

"I honestly didn’t think your face was capable of such a thing. Your muscles actually, you know.  _Know_  how to smile?”

Thorin frowns at him.

"Aaaand it’s gone again.  _Pity_.”

A pillow nearly hits Frerin the face and wipes his sarcastic smile right off his lips: he dodges it just in time, spilling tobacco over himself and hopping off the windowsill, putting it out with his heel as the smoke caught in his throat makes him double over coughing.

"If you two don’t quiet down I’m throwing something bigger." Dis mumbles without opening her eyes.

"Like what, like a chair?" her youngest older brother spats back through wheezing.

"Like  _Dwalin_.”

* * *

## three

Dis shoves Frerin aside and squints, the fire that’s a few feet away’s embers making her eyes glisten with violets and oranges. “They have the  _halfling_ ,” she hisses.

Frerin manages to ram his head over her shoulder, “Good gracious, they do. AH.  _NOPE_ -” and he’s grabbing the edge of Dis’ cloak and dragging her back down into the bushes they’re hiding behind. “Running off to play the big hero is  _not_  an option.”

"But they  _have the halfling_.”

"But I’m not going to sit around and watch you get torn apart by  _trolls_!”

"I’ve beaten human merchants double their size. Besides, you don’t want to  _leave_  him there, do you?”

Frerin immediately averts her gaze and stares about three inces to the side of her left ear. She glares at him.

"Oh by  _Durin’s beard_ -“

"I wasn’t going to  _leave him there_ , don’t be ridiculous.”

Dis arches an eyebrow. "Oh, _obviously_. Now," she sarcastically grins at her older brother, "How about  _you stay here_ , and I go and save him." and then springs up before he can even react, smile falling almost instantly.

"Dis! _Dis_!" the other hisses after her, fumbling and trying to grab onto her cloak and simply clenching and unclenching his fists around thin air. He stares at her back as she runs closer to the campfire and curses under his breath before burying his hands in his face and groaning loudly. He glares at his little sister, stands up too and turns around, running to call Thorin.

For a fraction of an instant he envisions Dwalin wrenching his head clean off of his shoulders should she get hurt, but he quickly swallows the mental image away and decides to ignore the terrifying tattooed dwarf's possible ( _probable_ ) rage. " _Mahal have mercy_." he sighs.

* * *

## four

She screams the loudest because it is the only thing she knows how to do- she does not cry. She does not know how to cry, her mother died before she could teach her that queens are allowed to weep, that tears are not weakness, that they are diamonds and pearls and beauty quilted onto proud cheeks and cheekbones and jawlines.

Dis of the Lonely Mountain does not cry when the white warg's fangs bury themselves into her brother's chest.

She screams, and throws herself forward as the hobbit had done only moments before, sword unsheathed, hair wild, eyes burning. She can hear her brother behind her, the dwarf she's chosen to love in front of her. And she is screaming her throat raw when her blade collides with one of the orcs' mount, scarring it between the eyes. She is screaming as loud as she can, because it gives her purpose. Because it gives her hope. 

She screams.

Her brother is nothing but clenched teeth and furrowed brows and precise, horrible blows, surgical precision, an artery cut, blood spraying his face.

He does not scream. His chest is too empty for him to scream. He gives them silent deaths, does not give the orcs (the beasts the creatures the scum) the privilege of him yelling as they die. They do not get his hoarse voice as their twisted eulogy.

He's always preferred silence to words, writings to speeches, books to people. He was born to be a scholar, not a monarch, not a warrior. He was born to write and lose himself in the dust that old books bleed, he was not built to wash his hands in crimson. He was not built to scream. 

Dis is fire screaming down a sloping hill. Frerin is the quietness that nighttime brings. They are both the terror of children watching their big brother die.

(He does not die. He does not die, miraculously, and they ride on the backs of the children of Gods. He does not die, and the halfling saves him, and Thorin's eyes brim with tears when he sees the Lonely Mountain, high on the Carroc, near and far and everything in between- there is a tapestry of memories laid down between them and the mountain for the dwarves of Erebor to walk upon. He does not die.

Frerin breathes a sigh of relief.

Dis lets her hand creep against Dwalin's, they clench each other for a moment).

* * *

## five

It's cold. It's cold, and it bites down into Frerin's skin: it's cold from outside, but it's also cold from within, ice stored in his bones that always seems to trickle out at the worst of times. He lets his eyes stare right in front of him and decides not to see, piles and piles of merciless, unforgiving, rotten gold. A treasury so big he knows he probably won't be able to find the entrance again. It still smells of dragon, of fire. Somewhere, he tricks himself into smelling burning flesh (but he is too small to remember it all, or remember it well). His leg hurts where the orc landed their mace so many decades ago, an old scar that still throbs when the weather isn't quite right. Azanulbizar dug a hole in his chest in the shape of his grandfather, dug a hole in his sister in the shape of the scars that cross through her face, dug a hole in their brother in the shape of a broken heart, never healed.

Frerin stares at the pile of gold and revels in the quiet spot he's managed to dig for himself, the moment of peace as his mind throbs and he buries his face between his legs, presses his temples between his knees. His brother is losing his mind.

His brother has  _lost_ his mind, chased Bilbo away like a snarling, vicious dog, like a wolf in dwarf's skin, blue eyes a shade darker, teeth bared, Bilbo dangling for a moment over the edge of the mountain, Dis yelling her brother's name and dragging him back, despite she's half his size, despite him nearly hitting her (Dwalin had stepped in and Thorin had let go of Bilbo without saying a word, and Bilbo had scuttled away, hid in a corner, trembling), despite the Arkenstone having already gripped his mind as tight as possible, having no intention of letting go.

Frerin kicks a crown and it topples down a slope of coins and he scoffs to himself. There's footsteps.

"Hey, you."

His sister's voice is low and raspy. Frerin glances behind his shoulder and sees her wrapped in furs, a new braid framing her face (a small bead made of bone, he notices, Dwalin's monogram etched onto it clasps it at the end), the first smile he's seen in a while timidly cracking her lips open. 

"May I sit?" she asks. He nods. She scuttles close, like when they were children, and wordlessly slips a corner of her fur blanket over Frerin's shoulder. He absent-mindedly snakes an arm around her hip and she leans her head on his lap. Frerin stars playing with her hair, grabs the new bead and rolls it in his finger. He tugs a little, "It's pretty."

She smiles, proud, "He made it himself."

"Well it's about time he made things official."

Dis sighs and, unseen by Frerin, her smile just gets a little more bitter. 

"Does Thorin know?"

She shakes her head. It's Frerin's turn to sigh, and then they're quiet for a while. She seems so  _tiny_ , hidden in his arms, and Frerin half expects Dis to ask him to tell him a story, like when they were children. 

 _Talk to me of Durin the Deathless. Speak to me of Mahal the Maker, of the First Elves, the First Dwarves, the coming of Melkor_.  _Sing me a song_.

"I'm scared," she whispers instead. "I'm scared of what the Elvenking and the Bowman will do to us once they get their hands on us."

Her eyes (blue, like his, like Thorin's, like their grandfather's) shine splashed with golden, reflect the riches they are lying upon. Frerin lets go of her hair and rests his hand on her shoulder. He doesn't answer, he doesn't know how. 

Dis runs the necklace she found earlier through her fingers and wonders if it was their mother's.

* * *

## six

In the quietness of death that follows, Dwalin's scream is the first thing that Balin hears.

He turns around, bloodied and torn, to see his beast of a brother tear through the bodies of men and elves and dwarves alike, screaming because that is the only thing his brain is currently allowing him to do- and Balin's heart stops for a moment in his chest, because he knows exactly what Dwalin's seen.

 _No_ , he thinks.  _Not you too_. 

Two, _two is enough_ : he saw Thorin hit in the back and he saw Frerin's eyes bulge, terrified, and then he saw him launch himself forward towards his older brother, stop, frozen in time as an arrow hit him too, as the blood pooled in his mouth and dripped through his teeth, with waves of red clouding his vision he'd looked down at his wound and then up, and seen Dis' horror. He'd tried to scream at her to stop.

And then Balin had lost sight of the three of them in the chaos of war, and Dwalin has just found the bodies.

 _She's so small_. Balin whimpers to himself.

And it's true, she is: pale, eyes closed, right ear chopped clean off, and Dwalin's cradling her body the way one would cradle a broken doll, and that's what she looks like, and his brother is sobbing (he's never seen him cry) and Balin makes his way through the battlefield. Dwalin's rocking back and forth, Dwalin's shaking, mumbling " _No_." over and over and over again, a broken-hearted man's prayer whispered into a black hole that's dripping blood.

"No. No no no no no  _no_."

He screams again, and all it does is haunt him to the bone.

* * *

## seven

She learns to walk again, and she is alone, and she is queen. And she learns to walk again. 


End file.
